Dr. Carson tarnishing his image

I have long known about Dr. Ben Carson, a brilliant and gifted neurosurgeon whose extraordinary journey from the depths of poverty in a downtrodden Detroit neighborhood to the pinnacle of his profession captured the imagination of many.

His success against all odds is what we like to call the true American story, and we like to lean heavily on such stories and plumb them for answers whenever we fear the American dream is becoming an illusion.

Now retired, Dr. Carson, a Fox News contributor, is fast making a name for himself as a conservative commentator, and in the process, I believe, is tarnishing his image.

On Thursday evening I went to hear him speak at the Hanover Theatre.

He didn't repeat controversial comments he made in previous speeches — saying black people were irrational for voting for President Barack Obama, likening gay marriage to bestiality and declaring that the Affordable Care Act is the worst thing to have happened to this country since slavery.

Yet, as I listened to his speech, I couldn't help but think of an observation made by Marlow, the narrator in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

"There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies — which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world — what I want to forget," Marlow said.

It wasn't that Dr. Carson was feeding the audience lies. It was just that his funny and instructive speech, delivered with a simple but deceptive clarity, was more hallucinogenic that it was edifying.

It was straight out of the conservative playbook of the past decade. It pandered nostalgic solutions as fixes for the inequality and dwindling opportunities in this country — work hard, turn off the television and study hard, get the government out of our lives and pull yourself up by the bootstraps.

But if that is all it takes, why is inequality rising and the middle class falling even as Americans work harder than ever, and amass more schooling, piling up tuition debt at astronomical levels? Why have so many Americans who had pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and were about to retire still working or looking for work?

The answers to these questions require sober contemplation, not the comforting nostalgia Dr. Carson dispenses, such as his statement Thursday evening that schools should not be teaching kids the things their family should be teaching them. This generated one of the many occasions of applause he received during the speech.

Dr. Carson, however, didn't say who should teach those "things" to the kids without families, but I wasn't surprised.

His solution to our health care challenge is to provide every child at birth with a health savings account. Even if this is a viable option, it doesn't provide a solution to the millions of people who without the Affordable Care Act currently cannot afford health insurance.

Dr. Carson is very comfortable underscoring the height of his remarkable success, but remains silent on the impact that the social and political construct of his mother's time might have had on her not getting more out of life than a third-grade education and jobs cleaning toilets and scrubbing floors.

Similarly, Dr. Carson ignores the current economic reality in which business profitability is less and less linked to job creation, which means there is a diminishing return on our labor and accomplishments, no mater how hard we work and how much education we receive.

Dr. Carson should know this, and it grieves me to see a man of his stature forgo honest intellectual discourse to wallow in the muck of dime-a-dozen political hacks.